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This book is about how to run services, in any organisation, in any industry. It describes the basics, the core stuff, in realistic pragmatic terms. And it is pragmatically brief - we kept it to 50 paperback pages.

The itinerant folksinger Rambling Kid Realitsm is like many outspoken protesters: he upholds the long association between radical ideals and dubious personal hygiene, and he has only a vague grasp of actual facts. That said, we reprint here his latest protest song Frameworks they are a Changin' for you to make of it what you will...

[Updated 22/10/10 with more news, see end of this post]
[...and 23/10 with even more silliness from Peoplecert]
[...and so it goes on. Peoplecert seem totally incapable of understanding how copyright law operates.. how do they get to be an EI?]
[update 27/10: finally the content properly honours the original source, but it leaves us with two questions - see end of this post]

Not long ago the IT Skeptic told you about the appointment of the ninth ITIL Examination Institute (EI), Peoplecert, of Greece. Is this related to the ITSM-ITIL-PeopleCert website busily ripping off everyone else's web content without permission and using the trademarked ITIL swirl logo as their twitter picture? I hope an EI would have more respect for intellectual property. of course it can't be them because they are accredited by APMG and APMG audit their EIs so closely. Can it?

Why did OGC get control of ITIL licensing content back from the British Government agency (OPSI) that is tasked with making government IP freely available to the public or at least free from monopolistic trading on it? Did TSO spit the dummy at the competition for their ITIL product sales? Or is it just that OGC are tasked with becoming a profit centre instead of a body for the public good? And where does that leave all the volunteers who so willingly contribute to the promotion and translation of ITIL? Who are they working for? We've had our share of commercial dirty deeds in ITIL's past but this latest lot may be the most troubling. (and check out this amazing video from the 1970s: AC/DC in their early days on Australian TV)

This book is essential reading for all decision makers (IT-literate or not) who are presented with an ITIL® proposal or who are asked to oversee an ITIL project, or who find something called “ITIL” or “Service Management” in their budget. It tells you what the ITIL industry won’t. For everyone else involved in ITIL projects, this book is just as essential to help you through the ITIL minefield.

Recent ITIL certification stats published by EXIN that originate from APMG show clearly that over quarter of a million ITIL certifications are issued every year (extrapolating the 9 months of stats).

200,000 of them are V2 and V3 Foundations. V3 Foundations outnumber V2 Foundations by about 6:1. So every year we certify another 200k ITILers. Think about it: three years of V3 certs, plus a decade of V2 certs. There was a rumour a while ago on twitter that we'd passed the million. I have no doubt it was true. As Mythbusters would say: "plausible"

Oh dear. “The heart of ITIL is the CMDB”? No it isn’t. Not unless you are looking at ITIL from underneath. Yet another example of inside-out thinking instead of outside-in. Do customers care about the CMDB more than the Catalogue? No. Is ITSM about being customer-focused and service-centric? Well, I thought so.